English Grammar For Economics And Business

Patricia EllmanEnglish Grammar For Economics And Business For students & professors with English as a Foreign Language Download free books at... Download free eBooks at bookboon.com2 Pat

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Patricia Ellman

English Grammar For Economics

And Business

For students & professors with English as a Foreign Language

Download free books at

Trang 2

Download free eBooks at bookboon.com

2

Patricia Ellman

English Grammar For Economics

And Business

For students & professors with English as a

Foreign Language

Trang 3

3

English Grammar For Economics And Business: For students & professors with English as a Foreign Language

2nd edition

ISBN 978-87-403-0653-8

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English Grammar For

Economics And Business

4

Contents

Contents

Acknowledgements 7

Introductory Remarks and Reference Works Consulted 8

1 Explanations of Common Errors in Alphabetical Order 22

2 Confusion Between Certain Words 86

3 Notes on Style 103

4 he Finishing Touches: 22 Basic Tips for the

Final Editing of Texts and heses − a Checklist 114

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Contents

5 Everything You Always Wanted to Know about the Deinite

and the Indeinite Article (but Were too Confused to Know Where to Begin) 118

Section 1: Analysis of presence or absence of the deinite articles

in various foreign languages 123 Section 2: he irst Diagnostic Test 133

Section 3: he most widely-used constructions using the deinite

and indeinite articles 140 Section 4: Final remarks on the use of the and a/an (not always as articles) 157

Section 5: Reference essay: A key to the application of the

80 Rules for using/not using the articles 164 Section 6: Concluding remarks to Chapter 5 186

6 About the Author 188

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I will not go down to posterity talking bad grammar

(written when correcting the proofs of his last Parliamentary speech on 31 March 1881)2

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Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

First, I must thank all the economics and business students who provided the raw material (i.e the grammatical errors) and raison d’être for this guide

I am equally grateful to Professor Peter Nijkamp and the late Professor Piet Rietveld of the Department

of Spatial Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration (including the Center for Entrepreneurship) of the VU University of Amsterdam for kindly giving their time to read the irst drat, and suggesting a number of additional points of English grammar that oten perplex writers

of English as a foreign language In addition, Professor Jeroen van den Bergh of the Department of Economics and Economic History at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, went through the whole text forensically, and gave valuable feedback And, at a later stage, Professor Peter Wakker of Erasmus University, Rotterdam allowed me access to his own 84-page aide-memoire on the intricacies

of English usage, which generated some extra ideas

Many thanks also go to Ada Kromhout of the Writing Skills Department of the University of Amsterdam, who wordprocessed an earlier much shorter drat, and set an immaculate standard for the layout of later drats For a later but not inal version, special thanks are due to Ellen Woudstra, Editor at the VU Department of Spatial Economics And I much appreciated the friendly encouragement and practical assistance given by Elie Bonke of the VU Secretariat which helped me persevere with this task My usual role in the Faculty is just to correct English grammar; writing about it is quite another matter when there are so many ‘exceptions to the rule’ and divided opinions Finally, I am indebted to Miriam Drori, editor and author, for her thorough proofreading

I dedicate this book to my dear husband, Michael In my attempts to create example sentences, relevant for the target audience, he was a patient sounding board

Patricia Ellman

Amsterdam, 2013

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Introductory Remarks and Reference Works Consulted

Introductory Remarks and

Reference Works Consulted

he following points of English grammar, style and presentation are those which are most relevant for economics and business students with fairly advanced English as a Foreign Language (EFL) his guide represents a distillation on a need-to-know basis of the myriad points of grammar found in standard textbooks Some students with EFL have access to in-house English courses, but many do not, and those who do oten say they are too general to be useful

he selected solecisms mainly concern the most common types of error that I have encountered over the course of 30 years, when working on around 2000 texts (articles, theses and books, both single- and multi-author) produced by EFL M.Phil and Ph.D students and academics My client base includes authors from many diferent countries (e.g the Netherlands, Italy, Portugal – including the Canary Islands, France, the Central and Eastern European countries, Morocco, Turkey, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Indonesia, and China hey write on a wide range of subjects, such as taxation policy, corporate social responsibility, educational economics, environmental economics (including insurance and measures taken against lood risk; road pricing; containerization; and airport logistics), urbanization processes, and network theory applied to commuting

Amongst other things, the guide tackles such constantly recurring grammatical problems as:

• How to correctly place those slippery words: already, also, oten and only in a sentence;

• When to use, or not use, the deinite and indeinite articles (the, a/an);

• How to decide whether to use like or such as;

• When to use less and fewer, few and little, big, large and great; and

• How to choose between compared to and compared with

In many cases, there is a clear right or wrong usage, but sometimes it is a case of knowing what is formal style, suitable for scholarly texts, and what is informal and therefore inappropriate in such texts On a few occasions, it is simply a question of making a choice between two equally acceptable forms, and then sticking to that choice consistently

To help with my explanations, I have consulted the following works:

Atkinson, Max, Lend me Your Ears All you need to know about making speeches and presentations, Random House, UK, 2004 (An invaluable reference work for those, like Dutch Ph.D students, who have

to defend their thesis, oten in English, in public.)

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Baron, Kathleen, Teach Yourself Good English A practical book of self-instruction in English Composition (based on the work by G.H hornton, completely revised and enlarged), he English Universities Press Ltd, London, UK, 2004

Billingham, Jo, Editing and Revising Text, one step ahead series, Oxford University Press, New York, 2002

Bourdieu, P & J-C Passeron, ‘Introduction: Language and the relationship to language in the teaching situation’ In: P Bordieu, J-C Passeron and M de Saint Martin, Academic Discourse, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994

Bronk, Richard, he Romantic Economist Imagination in Economics, Cambridge University Press, 2009 (See the Notes on Style in Chapter 2 of this guide.)

Bryson, Bill, Troublesome Words, Penguin Books, hird Edition, 2002 (Written with the authority of a former subeditor of he Times.)

Bryson, Bill, Bryson’s Dictionary for Writers and Editors, Doubleday, London, 2008

Burroughs-Boenisch, Joy, Righting English that has gone Dutch, Kemper Conseil, Voorburg, 2004 (A unique guide aimed especially at Dutch users of English and their particular problems.)

Canoy, Marcel, Bertrand meets the fox and the owl Essays on the theory of price competition, Ph.D thesis, Tinbergen Institute Research Series, no 48, hesis Publishers, Amsterdam, 1993 (A model Ph.D thesis written in English by a Dutch economics student.)

Carter, Ronald & Michael McCarthy, Cambridge Grammar of English A Comprehensive Guide Spoken and Written English Grammar and Usage, Cambridge University Press, 2006 (his directs the reader to the website: Cambridge.org/corpus, a collection of common mistakes, and has a useful section on academic grammar.)

Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 11th edition, Oxford University Press, New York, 2004

Cook, Vivian, Accommodating Broccoli in the Cemetery, or Why can’t anybody spell?, Proile Press, London,

UK, 2004

Duckworth, Michael, Oxford Business English, Oxford University Press, 2004 (Section 36 gives a few exercises which provide limited practice in the use of the deinite and indeinite articles; but, in this respect, see also the Diagnostic Tests in Chapter 5, Sections 2 and 5 in this present guide)

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Fowler, H.W., Fowler’s Modern English Usage Oxford University Press, First Edition, 1926 Revised hird Edition by R.W Burchield, 1998 (An enormously readable, oten witty, guide to the complexities of the English language.)

Gooden, Philip, Who’s Whose? A No-Nonsense Guide to Easily Confused Words, A & C Black Publishers Limited, London, Second Edition, 2007

Gordon, Karen, he Transitive Vampire An Adult Guide to Grammar, Severn House Publishers Ltd London, 1985 (Endorsed as ‘extremely bizarre’ by Frank Muir, but has a good explanation of squinting modiiers; see also Chapter 1 of this present guide.)

Gwynne, N.M., Gwynne’s Grammar he Ultimate Introduction to Grammar and the Writing of Good English, Ebury Press, UK, 2013 (he latest, but still totally traditional, primer.)

Keleny, Guy, Errors and Omissions (An informative column which appears every Saturday in he Independent, an English newspaper It picks out the main lapses of grammar and style in that paper during the previous week.)

Keynes, Maynard, Essays in Biography, Part II Lives of Economists, Mercury Books, 1961 First published

in 1933 (An example of an English economist who wrote well.)

Lamb, Bernard C., A National Survey of UK Undergraduates’ Standards of English, he Queen’s English Society, 1992 (Contains some surprising indings – see p 13 of this present guide.)

Lamb, Bernard C., he Queen’s English and How to Use It, O’Mara Books, 2011

Leech, Geofrey & Jan Svartik, A Communicative Grammar of English, Second edition, Longman, 1994

McCloskey, D., Economical Writing, Waveland Press Inc., Long Grove, Illinois, 1999 (his little book is speciically addressed to improving the writing style of economists – see also Chapter 2 of this guide.)

Quest, he Journal of the Queen’s English Society (his quarterly journal is devoted to encouraging the correct use of English and has interesting, oten amusing articles on the state of the art of English grammar.)

Shortland, Michael & Jane Gregory, Community Science A Handbook, Longman Scientiic and Technical, England, co-published with John Wiley & Sons, Inc New York, 1991 (his book gives good advice about both written and oral presentations.)

Strunk Jr, William & E.B White, he Elements of Style, Longman Publishers, Fourth Edition, 2000 (he essentials of grammar are contained in this classic booklet.)

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